Stephanie Grace: Nagin is the serious e-mail offender

If attorney Tracie Washington wanted everyone's attention, she got it. By posting e-mails written by her nemesis, City Councilwoman Stacy Head, on the Internet, Washington got New Orleanians talking about all sorts of things. They're talking about Head's intemperate comments about her colleagues. They're debating the merits of pre-formed beef patties, canned soup and packaged Rice Krispies Treats. They're marveling over Head's apparent inability to think before she whips out her BlackBerry.

Consider the city officially distracted.

One of the things it's distracted from, unfortunately, are the larger e-mail related issues swirling around City Hall. The Head e-mails that Washington carefully selected may make for great reading, but the more important story here is the Nagin administration's reckless management of electronic public records in general.

Last week, in the midst of the Head to-do, Mayor Ray Nagin once again declared himself a champion of the public's right to know. He told WWL-TV that he's "just looking for consistency from the courts as far as how to handle e-mails and how do we release public information, just whether we're really going to be in the business of full transparency."

I'm sorry, did he actually say consistency?

Let's review the record.

On the one hand, Nagin has shrugged off the stinky circumstances surrounding his office's release of e-mails from Head and three other council members. Despite a policy requiring records requests to go to the city attorney's office for review, Washington was able to get tens of thousands of council e-mails from Sanitation Director Veronica White, without the city attorney or council's knowledge. Yet neither White nor technology chief Harrison Boyd, who gave her the e-mails, have suffered any apparent repercussions.

City Attorney Penya Moses-Fields also complained when Judge Madeleine Landrieu ruled that the administration could not release council e-mails in response to a different records request without allowing the council's lawyer to screen the documents for protected information.

"So, the citizens do lose out on today because the transparency issue is being skirted around, " Moses-Fields said.

Yet Nagin has also gone to extreme lengths to keep his own e-mails and schedule behind the veil.

Sued by WWL for lack of compliance with public records requests in a timely manner, the administration was assessed thousands of dollars in penalties for what Judge Rosemary Ledet labeled "unreasonable and arbitrary refusal to respond."

In the same suit, Nagin's lawyers argued that the locations of numerous meetings fell under executive privilege, which the law doesn't recognize. He tried to claim the same exemption for his letter to Former President George W. Bush seeking a pardon for former City Councilman Oliver Thomas, as if that was somehow none of his constituents' business.

Worst of all, Nagin staffers deleted -- in effect, destroyed -- reams of public records they were required by law to preserve and make available to the public upon request, all in the name of some supposed server space shortage.

And they tried to keep the deletions secret too.

The fact that many of the mayor's records had been purged didn't come to light until WWL went to court. In a separate suit by The Times-Picayune, outgoing Recovery Director Ed Blakely said in an affidavit that he deleted most of his e-mails after being told that his inbox had exceeded its space limit. The message came two months after the newspaper requested the records.

Despite his actions, there was Nagin last week, lecturing council members on the need to comply with just such requests.

"I understand what the council is going through, " he said. "This feels invasive. Your initial reaction is not to want to release that information, but we're public servants and ultimately that information gets in the public domain."

This from a man who once vowed to "have a good one-on-one" in the parking lot with a television news director who was planning to run a story based on Nagin's previous year's calendar.

No question, her newly released e-mails show Head to be hotheaded, judgmental and unprofessional. She is embarrassed, as she should be.

But it's the Nagin administration that has violated both the spirit and the letter of the public records law.

It's worth remembering the difference.

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Stephanie Grace is a staff writer. She may be reached at 504.826.3383 or at sgrace@timespicayune.com.